


running scared

by Lvslie



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Tentoo suffers, but it's all good, unplanned encounter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-11-03 08:51:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10963845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lvslie/pseuds/Lvslie
Summary: “Sometimes I wish we could go back,” she says in a small voice and his heart skips a beat.The human Doctor faces a moral dilemma as an unexpected visitor appears in Pete's World.





	running scared

**Author's Note:**

> written for @perfectlyrose and her prompt "i would do it all over again, if i could"  
> lots of love!

 

_(Just running scared each place we go_

_So afraid that he might show)_

 

“God, I’m tired,” she mutters and laughs—breezily—rubbing her eyes. “I don’t even know what’s my name anymore. Did we really _have_ to chase that Flox up to here?”

He grins helplessly and shrugs his shoulders, as though to ask, ‘ _what can I say_?’

She chuckles again. “Yeah, forget I asked that.”

Sun pokes out blindly from among the thick grey clouds. Rain keeps on falling, drumming against the window, purring out a vibrating ubiquitous noise. Weather like this makes him uneasy: twitchy movements, oddly rapid heart, acute vision. Peculiar hollowness in the chest and he’s never sure if that’s nostalgia, some sort of an odd meteopathy or perhaps being human is, in essence, exactly the persisting in this endless sense of inadequacy. Missing something he’s once had, something he can never retrieve. Missing something—or being afraid to lose something else.

He tries to memorize the moment with all the flimsy aspects and angles but as usually, it all circles back to her. She seems to be more, somehow, than the entire other-ness of the universe he walks through.

Hair pulled up into something messy, dark streaks beneath hurriedly applied blond dye. One of her fingers tracing the line of a steaming cup, too long cuffs of a thick green sweater and chipped nail polish. Shadows under her eyes, this absent-minded habit of lip-biting. Scent of freshly made tea and wet clothes mingled with a vague hint of perfume that’s become so familiar he can barely even distinguish it.

“Sometimes I wish we could go back,” she says in a small voice and his heart skips a beat.

The light is grey but shimmers to mute honey with each succulent strike the sun aims at his tiny little Earth. Her half-lidded eyes are lit up from below, warm but distant. She looks tired—with her cheek propped upon her hand and legs tucked beneath her. She’s older now, and somehow, she has never been more intensely palpable to him.

“How far back?” he asks, voice hoarse and a sensation in his gut that has little to do with sleep deprivation or the November wind or being damp from unexpected rain.

A tight smile. “I dunno. Don’t ... don’t listen to me, I’m not making sense.”

She wears tattered black chuck taylors and an oversized button-up that has once been his. There’s something in this quiet manifesto of belonging that keeps anchoring him in reality and reminds that he still feels warmer these days than he has ever before.

“No, tell me,” he says softly and she shoots him a sideways glance. A flicker in her eyes: something mischievous.

“Far back,” she says, voice whispery. “To the very beginning.”

 

_(Yeah, running scared, what would I do_

_If he came back and wanted you)_

 

And here it is: this ice-cold twinge of awareness somewhere in the back of his mind. Sort of like realising own consciousness while driving home a whole day’s work, sort of like thinking about the intricate mechanism your breathing involves. Sort of like being unable to stop hearing your own heartbeat.

A needle of vaguely alien but still fundamentally innermost _presence_ and he never knows, he can never be sure, if it’s _reality_ or it’s his own, relentlessly reviving, knack for sensing the possibilities accumulated around a given.

Or maybe _he_ is there, maybe he’s always been — maybe he’s watching, silently, waiting for him to stumble and fall. And the most frustrating is the very knowledge he _might_ still do and _he_ might still know it and—

And _oh_ , how wrong it feels. Knowing he can fail his own expectations of his own idealized possibility.

“Scotland, perhaps,” she mutters, unaware. “Or even earlier—Kyoto. I don’t know. Gamestation. Sometimes I think I’m losing grip on it all, that it’s … slipping away. I don’t want to lose it. I’d do it all over again, if I could.”

He tries to feel safe but he can’t — he’s seen enough suns to know they explode and annihilate in the end.

And her eyes are _radiant_.

“Would you change it?” he asks hoarsely and she catches his eyes. Funny how they’re in the middle of a murky diner in a town he’ll likely never be bothered to know the name of, buried among the clatter of plates and oddly cosy folk music, and yet there’s still no room for anyone else beside the two of them in this little moment.

He treasures it and claims it his own, and the chance of it is so slim but proud to exist, it extinguishes anything else.

(It’s _time_ and it’s his to do what he pleases with it.)

“Change?” Rose chuckles. “No, I—ah, well, I guess some aspects—”

“Excuse me,” an unfamiliar voice cuts in—thick Scottish accent and a rustling quality to it, “do you happen to know where we are?”

 

_(If he came back  
Which one would you choose?)_

He freezes. There is nothing else that can be said to describe the odd sensation within him: everything seems to still and lose vivacity and colour. Everything halts, gradually, by splinters of seconds, as though smothered by a looming sense of fate. He doesn’t understand what is happening, doesn’t understand what is about to unfold. He’s only sure of one thing—he’s afraid.

“Depends,” Rose says amiably, eyeing the stranger curiously, “on how precise you want your answer to be.”

“Ah,” says the man, letting out a wheeze of a chuckle, “any approximation would do, actually. I happen to be quite lost. An unplanned occurrence to my … vehicle.”

He tries to reason with himself. It’s a man. It’s just a man. Quite unprepossessing, too, if he may say so—not very tall, but rather intimidating still, with wrinkled sharp-featured face, shrewd clear blue eyes. Sounding Scottish. Fluffy salt-and-pepper hair. A velvety-looking coat. Odd gleaming shoes.

He tries to reason with himself, but he can’t _speak_ , can’t utter a sound. He’s suffocated by a seemingly unfamiliar scent that is simultaneously nauseatingly homely, nauseatingly … _known_. Recognised, on some deep level, by his cell memory. It’s something electric, something dry and whispery, something old. Old, but thoroughly so—ancient presence and tangerines.

Sharp blue eyes. Vehicle. Occurrence.

He’s vaguely, subconsciously, aware of the situation unfolding slowly. But he feels as though he has dissociated.

“We’re in England,” Rose is saying, her voice terrifyingly present and alive, still smiling. “Somewhere about fifteen miles from Newcastle. Quite far, I think, from where you’re from. But I’m aware it’s most likely not the answer you are looking for.”

Her honey-warm eyes are turned to the man, her gaze unfaltering and open. She worries her lower-lip, apparently lost in thought. Concerned. Wanting to help a stranger, a—

 _A stranger._ The word fills him with dread.

“Ah,” the man repeats, smiling a sharp and fleeting smile, “what gave me away? The accent?”

“Yes,” Rose replies lightly, “Scottish accent is quite tricky to imitate, isn’t it? So rough.”

Then she ventures, “Where are you from?”

_Quite far away._

“Glasgow,” the stranger replies, after a beat. He smirks. “Awful place. I never fit in.”

 

_(Then all at once he was standing there  
So sure of himself, his head in the air)_

 

And there it is—a sharp flash of recognition. He’s been right.

His time senses have been stymied, drastically maimed by the human intrusion from Donna Noble’s gene pool. It takes time and effort, now, to properly form the impression of possible turn of events. But it’s there—gold and sharply radiant, thick against the frailty of all the others, a strand composed of layers and acutely coiled. It’s not a human line of life. It’s not an alien one.

(Not to _him_.)

He gazes at Rose, suddenly horrified. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t _realise_. She’s talking about Glasgow, scoffing at the ‘dumpy feel’ of the city. She’s making small-talk and smiling a distant, polite smile.

And _he’s_ too much of a coward, too much of a selfish and rightfully frightened coward, to let her know.

Hollow, pained words find their way to his lips on their own accord, “How long do you intend to stay?”

The man turns, all lithe catlike grace and silvery-blue new set of vastly foreign characteristics. His eyes are inscrutable. “Just visiting. I’ll be going now. My vehicle needs repair.”

“Safe journey,” says the unbearable voice of Rose.

He can’t bring himself to as much as nod.

And he—the other him, the one clad in black and dangerously in control of the situation—turns lightly on his feet and walks off, sparing them the slightest of sharp smiles.

There’s a silence.

Sun has died wholly—thick grey clouds, and dreary light consuming them both. Her—with her still-steaming tea, him—with the scalding awareness of having committed something unforgivable.

He tries to bring himself to speak. He tries to force himself to tell her, to let her know, let her properly _choose_ this time, without any aid or ill-aimed patronising from anyone that deem themselves morally infallible. Make it different from the last time, make it _fair_ —

“What an odd place to get lost in,” says Rose, and her unassuming voice very nearly breaks his human heart.

“Rose,” he whispers, voice breaking, but he can’t follow through—he cannot. There’s some invisible, overwhelming force of panic and fear, stopping him, relentlessly reminding that he’s nothing now, _nothing_ if he doesn’t have her, nothing—

But the guilt is eating him alive, irony and disgusting in his mouth, clawing at his chest.

“And still not ginger, too,” Rose says thoughtfully, drumming her fingers on the mug. “Shame.”

It takes him a while to register what she has said. Again—everything stills. He stops breathing.

The sun is lighting up her catlike eyes. Rose smiles.

 

_(My heart was breaking, which one would it be_

_You turned around and walked away with me.)_

 


End file.
